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Leonid Hurwicz 21.8.1917
Leonid "Leo" Hurwicz (Russian: Леони́д Гу́рвич; August 21, 1917 – June 24, 2008) was a Polish-American economist and mathematician of Jewish descent, born in Moscow. He originated incentive compatibility and mechanism design, which show how desired outcomes are achieved in economics, social science and political science. Interactions of individuals and institutions, markets and trade are analyzed and understood today using the models Hurwicz developed. To date, Leonid Hurwicz is the oldest Nobel Laureate, having received the prize at the age of 90.
Hurwicz was Regents' Professor of Economics (Emeritus) at the University of Minnesota. He was among the first economists to recognize the value of game theory and was a pioneer in its application. Hurwicz shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson for their work on mechanism design.
Personal life
Hurwicz was born in Moscow, Russia, to a Jewish family a few months before the October Revolution. The family had originated in Poland and had lived in Congress Poland (the part of Poland then within the Russian Empire) but had been displaced by World War I. Soon after Leonid's birth, the family returned to Warsaw, Poland. Hurwicz and his family experienced persecution by both the Bolsheviks and Nazis, as he again became a refugee when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. His parents and brother fled Warsaw, only to be arrested and sent to Soviet labor camps. Hurwicz, who had graduated from Warsaw University in 1938, at the time of Nazi invasion on Poland was in London, moved to Switzerland then to Portugal and finally in 1940 he emigrated to the United States. His family eventually joined him there.
Hurwicz hired Evelyn Jensen (born October 31, 1923), who grew up on a Wisconsin farm and was, at the time, an undergraduate in economics at the University of Chicago, as his teaching assistant during the 1940s. They married in 1944 and later lived on the Mississippi River parkway in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They had four children: Sarah, Michael, Ruth and Maxim.
His interests included linguistics, archaeology, biochemistry and music. His activities outside the field of economics included research in meteorology and membership in the NSF Commission on Weather Modification. When Eugene McCarthy ran for president of the United States, Hurwicz served in 1968 as a McCarthy delegate from Minnesota to the Democratic Party Convention and a member of the Democratic Party Platform Committee. He helped design the 'walking subcaucus' method of allocating delegates among competing groups, which is still used today by political parties. He remained an active Democrat; even attending Precinct Caucus in February 2008, at age 90.
He was hospitalized in mid-June 2008, suffering from renal failure. He died a week later in Minneapolis.Nobel Prize in Economics
In October 2007, Hurwicz shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Eric Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study and Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." During a telephone interview, a representative of the Nobel Foundation told Hurwicz and his wife that Hurwicz was the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize. Hurwicz said, "I hope that others who deserve it also got it." When asked which of all the applications of mechanism design he was most pleased to see he said welfare economics. The winners applied game theory, a field advanced by mathematician John Forbes Nash, to discover the best and most efficient means to reach a desired outcome, taking into account individuals' knowledge and self-interest, which may be hidden or private. Mechanism design has been used to model negotiations and taxation, voting and elections, to design auctions such as those for communications bandwidth, elections and labor talks and for pricing stock options.Unable to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm because of his age, Hurwicz received the prize in Minneapolis. Accompanied by Evelyn, his spouse of six decades, and his family, he was the guest of honor at a convocation held on the campus of the University of Minnesota presided over by university president Robert Bruininks. Immediately following a live broadcast of the Nobel Prize awards ceremony, Jonas Hafstrom, Swedish ambassador to the United States, personally awarded the Economics Prize to Professor Hurwicz.
